Bread and Bread

Sunday, November 27, 2016

“Our men suffer from a peculiar crisis of masculinity,”
writes J.D. Vance in Hillbilly Elegy, his
memoir of growing up in a Rust Belt town inhabited by economic migrants from
Appalachia, “in which some of the very traits that our culture inculates make
it difficult to succeed in a changing world.”

I wanted the book to feel more like its cover.

I imagine New York agents and editors sending his manuscript
around in emails sprinkled with “zeitgeist” and “the white working class” and “fresh,
underrepresented voices.” I imagine them filling an unspoken quota that demands
more work by conservative writers (Vance claims a conservative identity,
although the book is only lightly political).

If that sounds like an ungenerous impression, it’s because
the book doesn’t quite accomplish what it explicitly sets out to do: represent
for an economic and cultural underclass, and offer some loose suggestions about
what this group needs, and why the rest of the country doesn’t understand. As a
memoir, it’s not poetic enough to fully reel me in; it’s written in the style
of a very good college entrance essay, with Vance frequently interrupting his
own narrative to ponder why his little Ohio town sent no students to the Ivy
League, where he would eventually land in law school. (My own public high school
in upper-middle-class Southern California sent one student to Yale and maybe one to Stanford. The vast majority
went to community college; a fair amount went to state schools.) I’m not sure
why Ivy League attendance is so highly privileged a barometer of success or
failure other than the fact that he eventually went to Yale, after a stint in
the military and a bachelor’s degree from a state school.

As a sociology text, it’s even less successful, tossing out
a handful of stats and footnotes about the economic prospects of his region, as
if they might accomplish what his storytelling alone cannot.

The book is most moving when Vance is simply writing about
his family, which is threaded with violence, addiction and love, and when he
admits that success born of hard work doesn’t pave over the scars of his
upbringing.

He writes adoringly about Amy Chua, his professor and author
of The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, and
I’m assuming she was his path to publication (insert sour grapes here). This
memoir more or less advocates for tiger-mother/bootstrap methods; Vance sees
“too many young men immune to hard work” in his midst, although he doesn’t view
them entirely unkindly. The problem, he says, is that they are taught that
their choices don’t matter.

This brings us to our current cultural moment, in which
roughly half of the country was too busy struggling to care for women,
queers, poor people and people of color to realize that the other half of the
country was growing resentful of their power. Or “power.”

Vance’s peers, he says, are the ones who thought Barack
Obama was a Kenyan-born Muslim. They were wrong, he says, but this belief shows
how “alien” he is to them. The implication is that Obama might be a good guy
and a Christian after all, but he and his cohort have somehow failed Vance and
his, as opposed to the other way around. Apparently it’s Obama’s job to lean
in.

2. i might make the
woke olympic team, but i wouldn’t medal

I’ve been wrestling a lot with my identity as a white person
since the election. When I read words like Vance’s, I feel frustrated with fake
victimization. America has failed his people because it fails all poor people,
and some of those people are white. But I don’t think it has failed anyone because they’re white.

Then I see a million memes and shallow first-person
articles about how too many white women voted for Trump, and I feel kind of
defensive and #NotAllWhitePeople. Emily Nussbaum, TV critic for the New Yorker, tweeted recently that she
had read 300 think pieces about working-class Trump voters but zero about the
large numbers of rich people who voted for him. It’s as if wealthy white
men—the demographic Trump will best serve, and which probably voted for him at
the highest rate—are either beyond help or beyond reproach, so let’s shit on
the less privileged people who voted for him.

I figured out what was tearing me up—besides my general fear
for our country’s future—in a Facebook conversation with my friend Courtenay.
She posted some examples of white people centering themselves on Twitter,
responding loudly to calls by POC to not
do that by doing exactly that. Essentially
a bunch of white people saying “Ugh, white people!” at the top of their lungs in
hopes of performing perfect allyship and proving their own innocence.

Roxane Gay recently tweeted (in response to comments that
she had made assumptions about a stranger’s gender and sexual orientation)
“Some of y’all go hard in the Woke Olympics.” Yes, that. The Woke Olympics. I
feel both the desire to win it and exhausted by its existence. I feel how it’s
a cerebral exercise that takes over my consciousness and tramples my humanity.
That’s not the same as saying “I’m so tired of political correctness,” because
this is about competition between a bunch of people with roughly the same
politics.

Anyway, when I shared some of this stuff with Courtenay,
along with my own need and failure to just sit down, shut up and listen, she
wrote:

“Many white folks have
anxieties about not being heard and not being included because they—especially
women—experience this phenomenon all the time everywhere. But learning to how
to sit with that discomfort in a situation that is not about them and to remain
an active listener when their presence is not a necessary component is
important, I think.”

So yeah, I think that’s my
thing. As a woman, a queer person, a nerd, an introvert and—most of all—someone
who spent several years recently trying to own my grief and pain and the ways
that life maybe hasn’t been one hundred percent easy on me (though still at
least 87 percent easy), I’ve struggled to speak up. But I’ve done it, and I’m
proud of that. I finally learned to be the drama queen I never thought I
deserved to be.

My challenge, then, is to
hold onto that while being smart enough to know the difference between writing
and speaking honestly about my own legit struggles without, like, running off
to Standing Rock and declaring myself Leader of Indigenous Peoples.

3. law and (post-traumatic stress dis)order

On Thanksgiving night, AK,
her sister and I saw Denial, in which
Rachel Weisz plays a pleasantly unlikely heroine: a Jewish academic who doesn’t
always know when to stop talking (in an unglamorous Queens accent). She writes
about Holocaust deniers and gets sued by one of them for libel. She learns that
in the British court system, the burden of proof is on the accused.
Infuriatingly, she and her legal team are tasked with proving not only that the
Holocaust happened, but that her accuser thinks it didn’t and willfully
manipulated facts to serve his own anti-Semitic agenda.

Possibly pondering the ridiculous wigs that British barristers have to wear in court.

The movie does a beautiful
job of dramatizing a story that is largely procedural and which takes many
turns for the anti-dramatic: the crux of Weisz’s struggle is that her team
doesn’t want her or survivors to testify. “Telling your story” is a big part of
the healing process, not to mention American ideology, so being told to be
quiet—to deny herself—is almost blasphemous. Trauma is being made to doubt
everything about yourself, including whether it happened at all, whatever “it”
is. Genocide. Rape. Even something as comparatively small as, say, a miscarriage.

But Weisz’s lawyers are right
that the Holocaust-denying historian in question doesn’t deserve her words, and
he definitely doesn’t deserve attention from survivors who’ve already lived
through hell. He is a fire, and he must be smothered.

I’m looking to the movie as a
reminder that there are ways to speak up and stay quiet at the same time. I’m
also trying to remember that the fire currently finding oxygen in our
country—the neo-Nazis and those who support them in whole or part—needs to be
snuffed out, for sure, but that the people who are spreading it are still
people.

When Fr. Greg first started
working with gang members at Dolores Mission parish in the eighties, Homeboy
Industries wasn’t some cool nonprofit being courted by a new documentary crew
every day. Gangs were seen by both law enforcement and the communities they
victimized as every bit as evil as the so-called alt-right. Fr. Greg said then
and now that there is nothing good about gangs, and he doesn’t work with gangs;
he works with gang members, who are human and inherently good.

Anyone who engages in hate is
coming from a place of deep hurt. A neo-Nazi “men’s rights” dude typing and
voting his anger from his mom’s basement isn’t any worse (or better) than a
gang member shooting at his rivals. Neither activity should be given an ounce
of credibility or glamour. But both practitioners are worthy of hearing, and if
we listen long enough, I’m sure we’ll discover that they’re not pissed at the
people they think they’re pissed at. Hopefully they’ll learn too.

Friday, November 11, 2016

In college I read a short story in which a boy gets
kicked out of school. He’s the child of migrant farm workers, and he has
trouble keeping up. He knows his parents will be mad. On the walk home, he
keeps thinking, Maybe it didn’t really happen.

Texas, 1942.

I’ve long forgotten the name of the book or author,
unfortunately, but that scene stayed with me because it perfectly captured
those moments in your life when you try to rewind time with your brain.

When I got out of work on Tuesday, I looked an animated
New York Times graphic that depicted a needle wobbling between Hillary and
Trump, showing the likelihood of who would get elected based on the count coming
in. It showed an 82% chance of a Hillary win.

Like so many people, I’d showed up to my local polling
place that morning feeling proud and optimistic. People chatted in English and
Spanish, greeted their neighbors and sympathized with a toddler who wondered where
the “boating” was.

The boating. Photo by Massimo Sestini.

By the time I’d picked up Dash from daycare and put him
to bed, the NYT needle was at 80%...for Trump.

Like so many people, my first thought was Wait…what? Like so many people, I
rapidly cycled through the stages of grief. Denial (polls hadn’t closed in the
West), anger (duh), bargaining (more on this in a minute), depression (for dinner on Wednesday I ate half a bag of gummi worms and scraps from Dash’s highchair). I don’t know if I’ve gotten to acceptance in any but the most
literal sense.

One of the weirdest and saddest parts of scrolling
through Facebook in the dark, on the floor of Dash’s room, was seeing posts pop
up from earlier in the day. People in pantsuits. Voting with their elderly
mothers or young kids. Proudly sporting their “I voted” stickers. The algorithms
pushed these posts upward and reminded us what the world we’d imagined hours earlier might have looked like. Maybe it didn’t really happen. I wanted
to grab the NYT needle and pull on it with all my weight.

2. a lump in my
throat, a lump in dash’s neck

Wednesday morning I woke up with the hungover feeling
that follows any awful event. But I spent most of the day focused on Dash. He
had a bad cold and, on Sunday, I’d noticed a little knot at the back of his
neck.

When you’re Cheryl Klein, you do not take any lump
lightly. I suspected a swollen lymph node, Googled the prevalence of lymphoma
in children (very low) and took him to the doctor on Monday. She wasn’t too
worried, but she uttered the word “ultrasound” before I told her my own cancer history and subsequent nervousness.
And that was enough to keep my anxiety at a low boil right through the
election.

The ultrasound was scheduled for Wednesday afternoon. That
morning, I realized I’d made the appointment on the four-year anniversary of
the ultrasound that led to my own cancer diagnosis. In the same building.

My magical thinking started zinging and popping like oil
on a hot pan. Why didn’t I make the appointment for a different day? But not
everything was going as it had in 2012. After all, that election went great! So
clearly, if good election = cancer, then bad election = no cancer. So Dash
would be okay, right? But, oh no, was I really about to throw the whole country—the
whole world—under the bus for the sake of my child? I would do it—it was my job
to be biased—but what a terrible person that would make me! It was like that
storyline on The West Wing when
President Bartlett had to step down temporarily when his daughter was kidnapped
so he wouldn’t make biased decisions and put the country in jeopardy to save
her.

Magic, phrenology, the EPA under Trump.

Yep, just like that.

Dash fell asleep in the car on the way to the ultrasound
appointment, and was still groggy as the tech gelled up his neck and rolled her
wand over it. He was still and compliant, the model of a good patient or a sick
child. I knew he was just sleepy, and he always takes a long time to wake up,
but a small part of me wanted him to squirm and shout, just to show the tech
(i.e. me) how healthy he was.

My heart raced and I wanted to cry. I kept telling myself
This is an opportunity to be brave. Thinking
of my story as dramatic and noble helped. I can be amazing for very short
periods of time. I held his head and his hand and chatted with him while I watched
the tech take measurements on the screen.

All ultrasounds pretty much look the same. If you’d told
me Dash’s lymph nodes were jelly beans or my own ovaries, I would have believed
it. Still, I tried to commit the images to memory. Later, as Dash ran around a
hot, empty park, I searched the internet for pictures of malignant lymph nodes
and healthy ones. Would I call Dash’s nodes round or oval? I couldn’t remember.
It seemed to matter. Everything looked the same.

As I Googled, my body chanted danger danger danger, transporting me to the days of fertility
treatment, miscarriage and cancer—all those times my future has hung on the
results of medical tests. But as true as that feeling was, I knew with equal
certainty that cancer wasn’t the end of the world. That’s the weird thing about
trauma. It makes you stronger and more vulnerable at the same time.

I texted with Kim, my hypochondria sponsor and an
epidemiologist, and she reminded me of the same: Most kids survive lymphoma and
leukemia these days. (I have two friends who lost nephews—separate nephews—to leukemia.
For them this parenthetical is not a parenthetical. For them “most” means
nothing.) Most adults do too.

See that look on her mom's face? That was me.

And guess what, Dash is fine. I channeled my dad and harassed
the doctor’s office into rushing the results, and they came back marked “mildly
prominent, nonspecific, possibly reactive," which is medical speak for “yeah, he has snot draining into his head and it made his neck bulge.”

3. safety
dance

The sun came out again in my little corner of the world. (I
mean this figuratively, because in L.A. it was already so hot and dry that Dash’s
hair stood on end after one trip down the slide Wednesday.) It wasn’t lost on
me that I was where I was—breathing a deep sigh of relief that my son was
healthy—because of luck and good health care. So many people forget that when
they vote: Those nice things you have? Most of them aren’t because of you. Some
of them are directly or indirectly on the backs of others. Some are just a roll
of the dice.

To be the healthy parents of a healthy child you were
fortunate enough to adopt. That is everything. To remember that my job isn’t to
hoard what I can and hiss and scratch to keep others away—that’s only possible
when I feel at least a little bit safe.

Working for safer factory conditions after the Triangle Shirtwaist fire.

I believe that people who voted for Trump don’t feel safe.
Some of them are right about their vulnerability, but wrong about the reasons. To
them I want to say:

Dude, I get the fear. And I know how hard it is to walk
toward the thing that terrifies you. Maybe for you a brown America feels like
the Huntington Hill Imaging Center feels to me—like the edge of the abyss. But it’s
made of metal and plastic, polyester and people. Only the abyss is the abyss.
The rest you just have to walk into.

Saturday, November 05, 2016

The first neighbor we met after moving to our new house was an old Chinese woman; at
least, she looked old, but maybe she just spent a lot of time outdoors. She had
leathery brown skin, hair that looked as if it had been chopped by hand and
only a couple of teeth left. She always wore the same brown tracksuit jacket
with yellow stripes down the sleeves.

When she first showed interest in our broken-down moving
boxes, I thought she was collecting recyclables. I kept them out of the blue
bin and put them directly in front of the house for her. But then she put them
in the blue bin herself. And moved them from one bin to another. And
disappeared with the bins themselves for days at a time.

This is how moving feels.

She liked to knock on our door and let us know when we had
mail. Once she showed me where her shirt was missing a button and tried to hand
me a needle. Another time she showed up in our front yard as a pizza was being
delivered and begged for a piece. She had a habit of hovering too close when we
were getting Dash in or out of the car, and once she put her face right next to
the window of our babysitter’s car, making her jump out of her skin.

Sometimes she seemed like a toddler, and I tried to treat
her as such: Be friendly, firm and boundaried. Other times she seemed like a
creature from a horror movie, the kind of scorned, forgotten woman folklorists
might write about. I was naturally lazy and tried to practice an ethos of
Meeting People Where They’re At. When she moved our trash cans to weird places,
I just moved them back.

Not what she looks like. But how she kind of seems when she is suddenly outside your car window.

AK was more annoyed by such things, and I tried to back up
her annoyance as a show of solidarity. She bought padlocks and lengths of
plastic chain to anchor our trash cans to the fence.

On Tuesday morning I was putting on eyeliner in the bathroom when I
heard AK talking to someone outside. The voice had a Chinese accent. I knew right away that she
was the matriarch of the home two doors down from us, the sister or niece of
the free-range tracksuit-jacketed neighbor. When AK came in, carrying Dash, she recounted their
exchange.

Isn’t your baby cold? the woman had demanded.

It was in the upper sixties and Dash was in a diaper. He
probably was a little cold, which put
AK on the defensive. We’re only going
to be out here a minute. Hey…is she yours? AK gestured across the street,
to where the woman in the brown jacket was squatting. She goes through our trash and moves the
cans all the time.

She don’t listen to
me, said the matriarch. You don’t like
it, you can call the police. Where are you from?

AK suspected that the woman wasn’t looking for a story of
migration from Avenue 49. She got to the point: Mexico.

We’ve lived here 28
years, the woman said. Your baby, is
he cold?

Carrying a kicking Dash, AK stormed through the French
doors in our bedroom and told me the story. We agreed: Oh the irony of this
woman telling us what to do with our toddler when she had completely washed her
hands of hers!

In general I am slower to boil than AK, more prone to
self-blame and tears. But today I was mad with her. Any empathy I’d had for
this family—whose kooky aunt stalked the streets like La Llorona or some kind
of hantu—evaporated when they turned
their judgment on us. You know who might
be cold? I thought. Your sister, when she was taking off her shirt on the street
yesterday!

2. in which a bunch
of women try to solve racism on the internet while simultaneously caring for
small children IRL

The interaction replayed in my head at work and when I picked
up pizza for the Halloween festival at Dash’s daycare. In the parking lot of
Pizza Hut, I shared a quick rant on the subject with my favorite online
parenting group, Parenting for Social Justice. I wasn’t sure why. Maybe because
I was fascinated by all the layers of culture and experience that culminated in
this driveway exchange. This family had come all the way from…Taiwan? Hong
Kong? The mainland? They’d made their own lattices out of twigs in their front
yard, planted vegetables, flown little flags made of crumpled Chinese
newspapers to keep birds away. They’d set up camp and stayed here for 28 years,
watching the neighborhood blow in the economic breeze and become populated by more and more
Latinos, only to be overtaken by unkempt white people obsessed with Craftsman
architecture.

As I explained to my group, I had empathy for a family
trying to manage an unmanageable person. I did! I’d seen a teenage girl—dressed all in
black with a long ponytail and low-slung backpack—leave the house one day, and I
immediately wanted to hug her. It couldn’t be easy to be 16 and the niece of
the neighborhood Crazy Lady. But how dare the girl’s mother tell my family what to do, especially when her opinions had racial undertones!

Every 16-year-old ever.

Does anyone here have
experience with dealing with xenophobia from people who are themselves
immigrants? I asked after I’d shared my story.

The responses varied in tone, but they all agreed: I was the
xenophobe here. Village input on what a baby should be wearing was an Asian
thing (also a Chilean thing, according to one responder), and the woman meant
well. In the past, I’d shared thoughtful posts about gentrification in my
neighborhood, freely admitting I was part of the problem—and now this? I was
being a shitty neighbor at best, they said and/or implied, and a racist gentrifier at worst.

The responses came as a gut-punch. It wasn’t an unfamiliar
feeling. It was the same burning shame I’d felt during writing-class critiques
that had hit especially close to home. It was a small version of what I felt
the whole eight weeks AK and I had been separated in 2012, when I’d gouged
crescent moons into my forearms with my fingernails as I finally realized how
much I’d hurt her during my long, confused post-miscarriage depression.

There’s a phrase that has made its way from psychoanalysis
to the world of Instagram quotes in pretty fonts: Don’t just do something. Stand there. It’s a hard fucking thing to
do when what you want to do is jump up and explain how you’re not racist, or
how you can only know in retrospect that it might have been useful to go to a
miscarriage support group. But I did my best to apologize (but not grovel or angle for forgiveness) and
promise to the group that I would Sit With My Hypocrisy.

This quote is attributed to at least five different people online.

I’ve been sitting with it for a few days now. I messaged
with one of the group’s admins about a vibe I find troubling: A bunch of white
women in the group (not excluding myself) seem to try to out-perform each other in showing how
anti-racist they are. This morning one shared a sort of poorly written blog
post by a gay Black man titled “Why I Find White Women Terrifying.” It was an
opinion piece about the legit problem of white-centered feminism, but I found
the title sensationalistic and the thinking not terribly critical. And what
about the possible intersectional issue of gay men sometimes being dismissive
of women while assuming they can’t be misogynistic because they’re queer? The
white poster announced that she was going to Sit With It.

Lately I have felt the women of color in the group giving some side-eye
to white self-flagellation, and I do to. What they couldn’t say was a
sarcastic Oh look at you, you amazing
white person questioning yourself. Do you want a cookie? I’m not going to
give you my “likes” so you can feel good about yourself and I can go back out in
the world and deal with the same shit I deal with every day.

What they
could do was go a level deeper and point out why the white women in question
were actually still racist. Wasn’t the woman who said she wanted to limit her
dependence on fossil fuels because of the shit going down at Standing Rock kind
of centering herself when really
Standing Rock was about indigenous rights? It’s a pretty educated group, and if
the internet and academics and women are good at one thing, it’s picking each other apart. I’m not sure what to do with that, because the responses themselves aren’t
wrong. The white environmentalist was missing
a major point about Standing Rock. And anything I might post would sound
defensive and white. And it would be.

So I’m doing what I probably should have done a while ago.
I’m imposing a read-only break on myself for at least a week. I still cringe
when I think about how often I raised my hand in my undergrad Chicano Lit
class. I don’t want to be that undergrad, but I still am. Even by writing this
blog post, I’m centering myself, but I figure my blog is supposed to be about
me.

3. some of my best
friends

And I’ve continued to Sit With the complicated racial
dynamics between myself and the neighbors I barely know. Here’s something I’ve
realized—bear with me if you can, because I’m about to perpetuate some cultural
stereotypes. I can’t vouch for their certainty, but I can tell you how they
intersect with my own family culture, and that’s my real point.

So, I have three fairly close Chinese-American friends (yes,
I did just say “some of my best friends are…”) whose parents are immigrants.
I’ll change their names here.

Andrea’s mom is relentlessly pessimistic and difficult to
please. Andrea dreads going home for visits, and tries to stay with her in-laws
when she can. Andrea has stuck it out in a job with a difficult boss for longer
than most people would. At first she was eager to please this insatiable boss;
then she gave in to a strategy of low-grade rebellion and defeat. So she
basically works for her mom.

Alex’s mom was a textbook tiger mom with an added streak of
physical abusiveness. Alex wrote a semi-autobiographical YA novel about her
teen years. Her protagonist, trying to get her mom to ease up on academic
pressure, tells her mother that affirmative action will make it hard for
Asian-American kids to get into Berkeley. Her mom sees that as a reason her
daughter should work triply hard.
Alex is a mom herself now—a loving and hardworking one. But I see the ghosts of
her own childhood when she tries to get her son to “overcome his fears” and
“live up to his potential” where other parents might just shrug and let their
kid do what he wants.

Jennifer and her brother once discussed whether or not their
mother was psychologically abusive. They decided she wasn’t. But she used to
make them kneel for hours on uncomfortable beaded mats as punishment. She
encouraged Jennifer to make friends who could help her get ahead socially. I
never met Jennifer’s mother in person, but I always assumed she’d be profoundly
unimpressed by me.

In Andrea, Alex and Jennifer’s mothers, I see a familiar
message: The world is a harsh place. It
will judge you. It will spit on you. But this is no excuse to fail. This is why
you must work harder than anyone else. You are better than the rest of them,
but you can only unlock the fruits of your special-ness through pain. And if I
tell you these mean truths, it’s because I love you.

I’m sure my parents never meant to send me that message. But
my mom had martyr tendencies and never let herself indulge in so much as a
dry-clean-only blouse, and my dad still rants against entitlement(s), both as
an attitude and government programs. Some part of me believes that being queer
put me behind the starting line, and so any ways I fail in life are my own
fault and inexcusable.

I mean, I’m fine. I’ve had plenty of therapy.

But these are the voices in my head. And these were the
voices that bubbled up when I saw the responses to my Parenting for Social
Justice post. It struck a nerve for precisely the same reason the
Chinese-American neighbor herself had struck a nerve. The neighbor reminded me
of a worldview in which there was no room for me—especially me—to fail or complain. A
worldview in which I was both awful and special. The responses read the same
way to me: Other people can come here and
talk about how someone was a jerk to them, but if you do that, you’re racist.
YOU’RE the jerk. Suck it up, Cheryl.

That wasn’t what they were saying, of course. As I reread my
post, it did sound pretty knee-jerk and not very empathetic, especially without
the infinitely large context in which all human interactions take place. Family
culture on top of neighborhood history on top of immigration on top of
dynasties and dinosaur bones.

Orange you glad I'm about to wrap up this post?

In social justice and academic circles, people are always
talking about unpacking things. And now I’ve unpacked the unpacking process,
and could go on for another thousand words easily. But I already feel like an unpacked
bag, which is to say empty, flat and ready to stay home for a while.

A couple of days ago, the woman who moves our trash cans
gave me an orange and a bottle of water. It felt like a peace offering I didn’t
deserve, from a fight she didn’t know about. I took them, saying thank-you too many times, grateful for a moment of simplicity.

Tuesday, October 25, 2016

We left the West Oakland BART station at a reasonable time.
It was raining lightly. I reviewed what I was going to read that night as the
train rumbled beneath the bay. AK made sure the brakes were set on Dash’s stroller
and kept him entertained until we arrived in the Mission.

In the Mission, it was pouring. I’d forgotten that San
Francisco has a completely different microclimate from the East Bay. We were up
north for a long weekend, staying with Pedro and Stephen, who were brave enough
to put up two adults and a toddler for four whole nights. Their pit bull,
Sugar, spent a lot of the weekend shut in Stephen and Pedro’s bedroom, so she
made the biggest sacrifice. (Thank you, Sugar, if you’re reading.) The catalyst
for the trip was my reading, which was a small part of Mutha Magazine’s event, which
was a small part of LitCrawl, which is a big part of LitQuake.

Author photo. #NailedIt

We followed my map app for six blocks before it led us down
an alley lined with graffiti art and tents. It smelled like shit, the human variety.
AK opened her preferred map app and figured out that we should be on the other
side of Mission. She made a small triumphant noise about her superior map app
and I nearly throttled her because the only reason I hadn’t downloaded her app
yet was because I didn’t care about that stuff. Was she really taking this
moment—this moment of my soggy literary defeat—to declare victory in a
competition I hadn’t even agreed to?

We made up a block later, but I was still stressed, sad and
embarrassed. Despite our attempts to create a bubble of umbrellas around Dash,
he still got drenched. This is probably some sort of metaphor for parenting and
life.

The venue turned out to be a bar. The bouncer was busy
telling the couple in front of us, who also had a baby with them, that they
couldn’t bring the baby in. I kissed AK and Dash on their cold wet cheeks and
ran up the stairs.

I will say this for Bay Area crowds: They turn out in spite
of the weather. A similar storm in L.A. would keep 90% of the population home,
and the remaining 10% would get in car accidents.

I slipped in juuuust as the first reader was wrapping up and
took the stage like a badass or a drowned rat, depending on your
interpretation.

AK and Dash eventually talked their way in (they’re both
pretty persuasive), but by the end of the reading, Dash was fussy, and it was
all we could do to change his clothes and get out of there. I didn’t get to
mingle with the other readers (who were excellent) or see my friend Miah’s
reading during the next event block.

The rest of our trip was really lovely. Pedro and Stephen
are family. Eating veggie burgers and watching the final episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race with them is the sum
of all great things. I got to see my friend Patricia and her baby, although not
for long enough. We chilled with AK’s ex and her family at their house in
Mountain View. Their four-year-old told me about a scarecrow with Hulk powers
who was hopping through the trees in their yard.

Four of my favorite people.

Lovely, and yet my so-called literary career went from being
a small part of the trip to a microscopic part. And this feels like a theme in
my life lately.

When I got back to work, I told my boss about the reading.
She gave me an encouraging pat. “And you got up and read! In front of all those people! Have you ever done anything
like that before?”

I’ve worked for her for almost three years. I don’t know
whether she knows that, once upon a time, I published two books. That I’ve
given about a thousand readings. That I write something other than grants. I
don’t know whether I know myself.

2. fighting the war on hobbies

This past Sunday night, our friend Sally screened cuts from
her documentary-in-progress and asked for input from the group—other
filmmakers, a TV show runner, a couple of journalists, an editor, an attorney
and us. I know the group’s professions because we went around in a circle and
announced them. I didn’t say what I did, because I’m a rebel like that.

Sally is relentlessly curious, outgoing, passionate and
unafraid to ask anyone anything. These are perfect qualities for a documentarian,
and they lend themselves well to fundraising for said documentary too. She’s
good at what she does: She’s artful and prolific, and she has an impressive
teaching career to boot. She and her students are always jetting off to
Singapore or Iceland.

Setting aside her love of breastfeeding, Sally is a little
bit like a man. She sees opportunity and takes it. She doesn’t seem to waste
time questioning herself. The next day, a group of us met up for a play date at
the park. When a couple of our kids started wandering toward a birthday party
at the adjacent rec center, the party throwers invited us in. Sally’s partner
Meehan hung back because it wasn’t her party, but Sally threw herself into the
mix and ended up talking to a friend of a friend.

Fuck you, realism.

The next day I told my therapist, “I’m not sure I understand
people who don’t have at least a little bit of self-loathing.” But I’d like to
channel my inner Sally sometimes. I feel like Sally doesn’t try to squeeze her
creative life into the margins of the day. Other times I like being me:
hesitant, questioning, conflicted, invested in nuance.

This morning AK and I were having a fairly typical schedule
negotiation involving daycare drop-off, work and her yoga class when I veered
into a tearful meltdown about how I never
get to write anymore and it’s making me crazy and maybe I should give up and
call it a hobby, but damnit I won’t go down with out a fight, stop trying to
thwart me universe, and I know I should be grateful for all the wonderful
things in my life, but aaaaaahhhhhh!

She took it pretty well. Dash seemed a little confused. He
kept handing me his book that makes animal sounds. After I calmed down I told
him, “I was feeling sad because I didn’t get to do something I wanted to do,
when I wanted to do it. Like when you were upset just now about not getting to
play outside.”

Nothing like parenting a toddler to make you realize what a
toddler you are. That actually gives me more empathy for myself, not less. I
don’t expect Dash to be like It’s okay
that I don’t get to play outside because I live in a first-world country and
have parents who love me. He wants what he wants and he gets cranky when
he’s tired. So do I. And he’ll get to play outside soon, and I will try hard to
believe that there’s hope for my writing.

Sunday, October 02, 2016

Every few months, I
try to write a letter to Dash. They’re descriptive and mundane. This one came
out as a kind of prose poem, and it captures my current mood.

Father G says heaven is the present. I repeat this to
myself, which is an act of memory, which is to say: the past. This is the time
of year when the future shakes its fist.

Late afternoons in Los Angeles are a Maxfield Parrish
painting. As if your 20-month-old skin needed any help. It is the color of
toast, smooth as flan. You look west and I spy on you from inches away, your legs
against my hip, your face even with mine. In low light your irises and pupils
blend to black, but here I see the clear brown ring.

You want to ride in your green plastic car, the one with the
handle in back, for a grownup to push. I am shoeless, but you’ll cry if we go
inside again, so I lap the block barefoot, feeling trashy and wrecked, which I
am. Pods dropped from trees bite my soles. You have discovered the joy of
dragging your feet against the pavement. I retaliate by popping a wheelie,
which makes you squeal.

You point to silver cars and say “Mama!” as if any of them
might hold her.

*

On a windy hilltop in Japan, a boy steps into a phone booth
and calls his dead father from an unplugged rotary phone.

*

I used to console myself that if I died young, I would see
my mom and the babies I lost when they were still the size of pea pods. But
I’ve dug my roots deep in this world. Now it’s not just your Mama, Gramps and
Aunt Cathy I’d miss—and I would, but they are finished humans. You are the size
of a shrub.

You are a finished human. Heaven is now. And now. And now.
Each present falling off the conveyor belt and into the ether. To try to hold
on is to become Lucy Ricardo stuffing herself with chocolates.

*

A group of professionals gathered in a hotel conference room
and watched a PowerPoint presentation. Discussed capital campaigns and hidden
costs. Ate gluten-free pizza and cold asparagus spears. Then, “switching gears”
said their leader, they finished a sentence on large neon sticky notes.

Before I die I want to
__________.

There are only five things people want: time with their
beloveds, a safer world, to create, to travel, to accept themselves. I wrote Before I die I want my son to know how loved
he is (by me! And others too). I always suspect the universe of looking for
a loophole.

*

Hold this lightly, Dashiell, but squirrel it away, too, for
a dark day. You were someone’s heaven.

Monday, September 12, 2016

Lately I’ve been binge-listening to The Jackie and Laurie Show, a Nerdist-network podcast by comics
Jackie Kashian and Laurie Kilmartin about women in comedy. I’ve seen Kashian
perform locally a bunch of times, including once in someone’s backyard. A thing
I love about both of them is that they love comedy so much, and are so eager to
hone their material, that any shred of diva behavior goes out the window. At
the same time, they’re both refreshingly honest about their envy, ambition and
exhaustion, three major motifs in my life that are often swept under the rug by
artists when they talk about their work.

"Standup is making fun of podium culture."

The general mood of the podcast is “I want to do gigs and
learn things and think and make people think, and also goddamn it I’m tired and want
to just sit in my favorite chair.” That’s how I feel pretty much all the time.

Kashian and Kilmartin are both
about ten years older than me. As a pigeon mom/writer seeking viable role
models for my middle years, I have big admiration crushes on these women.
(Kashian talks about perimenopause sometimes, referring to it as “middle-aged
lady time”; even though I ripped off the menopause band-aid a few years ago, I
like that there are people making the next era in my life cool and funny
instead of cringe-worthy.) They are scrappy. They are realists. They talk about
what it was like to come up in comedy during a time when most lineups featured
one woman, but they’re also sufficiently tuned in to the youngsters; their take
on the Lena Dunham/Odell Beckham Jr. thing was the closest I’ve heard to my
own. They’re open-minded, they question themselves, they’re too old to put up
with shit and they are hilarious. I do a lot of literal lol-ing.

Their take: This is what it sounds like when you've always been told that everything you say is really special. I agree, although I also generally like Lena Dunham and think the overall backlash against her is weirdly hateful. She's talented and thoughtful and seems like a nice person who's willing to learn from her mistakes. So let's not act like she's Johnny Depp.

When I run out of episodes and return to my regularly scheduled programming, here is what I will listen to:

99% Invisible:
Exquisitely produced, this is a podcast about “the built world” that folds
ample doses of history and social justice into the realm of architecture,
planning and design. From gentrification in East New York, to the woman who
photographed the Bauhaus, to the man who designed “the worst smell in the
world,” this podcast will give you lots of weird but relevant tidbits to talk
about at parties. Plus host Roman Mars has a beautiful voice.

Check out the episode about Floyd McKissick, the civil rights leader who built America's first (only?) city by and mostly-but-not-exclusively for Black people.

Keith and the Girl: One
of the oldest podcasts out there, this one has a simple format. Keith Malley
and his bestie/ex-girlfriend Chemda Khalili shoot the shit about current events
and invite other New York comics on to do the same. Imagine a morning
radio show that wasn’t sexist, racist and annoying, and you’d have Keith and the Girl. Chemda especially
does an amazing job of calling out people’s ideas about gender, pulling no
punches but never lacking humor. They’ve introduced me to a diverse group of
up-and-coming comics that a West Coast girl who doesn’t get out much would
never encounter otherwise.

Chanel Ali (top left) is one of the funny people I've discovered thanks to KATG.

The Longest Shortest Time: Hillary Frank’s This American
Life-esque parenting podcast is going through some growing pains. Most
notably, it spawned a huge Facebook group that proceeded to implode as an
alleged casualty of the so-called Mommy Wars. You can Google it. The show
switched networks and lately has been short on fascinating interviews with parents of
all stripes (a multi-part series called “The Accidental Gay Parents” is one its
best) and long on shows about placentas. I know I’m biased as an adoptive
parent, but I really couldn’t care less about placentas. That said, I admire a
show that takes risks, and the beauty of the world outside network television
is that there is time and space for a show to find its way. I’m hanging in
there to see what’s next. Oh, and check out the episode in which W. Kamau Bell
interviews his mom about her dating life as a single parent.

Mom and Dad Are Fighting: Hosts Allison Benedikt and Dan Kois are both Slate editors; they
are smart, thoughtful people who are not especially spectacular parents, nor do
they express ambition to be the “best,” which is part of the show’s secret
sauce. The show is one part journalism (I especially liked their interview with
Nikole Hannah-Jones about school integration and gentrification) and one part
real-time memoir. They open each episode with a parenting triumph or fail, from
rescuing a daughter’s birthday cake from ants to fighting with a spouse in
front of the kids. I especially like Dan, a book nerd dad of two daughters,
whose blend of practicality and sensitivity is kind of aspirational for me.

Except in Dan's story, the ants weren't chocolate.

The Mental Illness Happy Hour: Paul Gilmartin’s deep dive into mental illness is my old
friend. It’s gotten me through some tough times. As a host—interviewing fellow
comics, celebrities and regular citizens like yours truly—Gilmartin is
simultaneously gentle and sincere and also funny and dark. He’s had guests who
have survived horrific abuse and others who struggle mundanely toward a sense
of self-worth. On this show, they’re all equally deserving of love.

London "match girls" who went on strike in 1888.

Stuff You Missed in History Class: This show is the opposite of 99% Invisible in terms of production values. Its hosts are two
women with non-radio-friendly voices who read their stories from the page. But
the stories are great: Harriet Tubman’s career after the Underground Railroad;
the British tradition of trashing brothels; a female serial killer who poisoned
a series of husbands in the 19th century; an experiment with
importing hippos. Periodically the hosts get emails from listeners complaining
that they “only cover women,” to which they respond that no more than fifty
percent of their episodes have ever centered on women, and thanks for the
feedback, here’s another episode about a woman. The big takeaway from this
podcast is the stuff you missed in history class was all the good parts.

Tuesday, September 06, 2016

A couple of Fridays ago, I came home from work, relieved AK
of Dash duty, fed him, put him to bed and set to work cleaning the house while
she caught her breath after a day of childcare. I picked up the remnants of the
day’s Dash-nado: blocks, balls, plastic eggs, a floppy-limbed Angels monkey, a
squeaky Lamb Chop that is actually a dog toy, multiple Wubbanub pacifiers,
keys, clothes and so many books. He likes sitting in our laps while we read to
him (and if I teach him to love reading my life’s purpose will more or less be
fulfilled), but he also likes flinging the ones he’s not interested in from the
shelves till he finds his favorites. He also likes stacking them on top his toy
drum and occasionally drawing in them.

I changed the sheets on our bed and ran a Swiffer Wet cloth
over the floors. I wiped down the sinks and toilets (it’s still weird to me to
live in a house with toilets, plural) and did a couple of little extra things:
dusted some floorboards and hung a picture. It gave me a high I can’t quite
explain. First, cleaning on a Friday night meant I would get to wake up to a
clean house on Saturday. When your child wakes you up every morning, you pretty
much start each day running behind. I’ve tried to get up before him. I always
fail. A clean house means you’re only a few paces behind instead of a mile.

Dusting floorboards and hanging pictures also communicated a
couple of untrue but satisfying things to me.

1) Surely a person who was taking care of details like this
must really have her shit together.

2) Maybe I hadn’t earned the money that paid for the house I
now pseudo-owned, but look at me caring for it—I would earn this house I didn’t
deserve one strip of moulding at a time.

Cleaning and organizing my physical surroundings makes my
scattered brain feel more orderly. My mom cleaned the house when she was
stressed out, and I am very much her child. I’ve been cleaning a lot lately
because of the new house—because of the false moral equation in my head, but
also because it cleans up a lot prettier than a bare-bones duplex with nine
years worth of dust in the corners and a splotchy wall where the handyman
didn’t match the paint right.

2. master of none

As I’ve cleaned, I’ve thought about cleaning. It’s something
I spend a lot of time doing. You wouldn’t necessarily know this to look at our
house. It’s a beautiful place, but mostly for reasons that have very little to
do with me. I’m certainly no decorator (except on Polyvore, which is basically
Fantasy Football for femmes). And while things are generally sanitary,
generally orderly, it’s not hard to find boxes full of completely random
objects—computer cords, vases, bundles of AK’s business cards, probably Dash’s
toothbrush—and there are small tumbleweeds of cat hair under most of the
furniture.

And yet I spend so much fucking time cleaning. I don’t hate
it, but I certainly don’t love it—not like writing, or talking to my friends,
or sex, or painting, or cooking. Or even exercise, which I don’t like all that
much. But cleaning takes up more hours of my week than any of those things. If
we could afford a house cleaner, it would probably make sense to hire one, but
I take a certain amount of pride in doing what most healthy mammals and birds
manage to do, which is maintain my little nest.

Does this mean that I’m more of an expert on cleaning than I
am on writing? Have I logged the 10,000 hours necessary to achieve mastery? I
still think I’m a better writer than housekeeper, for the simple fact that you
can build on a piece of writing, and you can build on that skill, whereas
cleaning is the same damn thing over and over. A woman’s work is never done,
right? And when all the males in your house are either under the age of two or
lack opposable thumbs (not to mention a work ethic), cleaning is a woman’s
work.

There was a time when I would have said—with a mix of
bitterness, pride and martyrdom—that I did more of the housework than AK,
although she always took care of the yard. This hasn’t been true for a while.
She still leads the charge in the yard, plus she does more of the laundry, mops
the floors, takes out the trash, makes sure we’re stocked with toilet paper and
paper towels, and probably some things I’m forgetting.

I imagine most middle class households have some variation
of this life (rich people have help, poor people often have multiple jobs and
probably don’t have much time to clean, although some make it a priority). But
people don’t seem to talk about cleaning a lot. Because it’s boring? But we
live in a world where people Instagram every meal, so “interesting” doesn’t
seem to be a high priority for sharing.

I do see a few proud before-and-after
pictures in my feed from friends who’ve tackled a particularly arduous garage
or neglected basement. But it’s worth noting that these achievements more often
fall under the banner of “home improvement” than “cleaning,” even if
significant cleaning is involved. And home improvement is cool, right? It’s
manly, sometimes glamorous. There are channels devoted to it. It takes money
and strategy, and there is a reveal. Cleaning is just maintenance, and
maintenance isn’t sexy.

3. “housework, if you
do it right, will kill you.” –erma bombeck

Cleaning is part of the domestic sphere along with
childcare, but while there is mommy literature and mommy blogs and mommy
comedy, and all of the above may contain jokes about cleaning up after kids,
there is no such genre as housework lit or housework blogs (unless you count
those hack videos that show you how to make a phone charger out of a dish
detergent bottle). Erma Bombeck, maybe?

Obviously raising children is more important and more
interesting than keeping a tidy house, but since the two acts often inhabit the
same physical space, I can’t help but think of them as competing for attention.
I certainly feel the tension between the two. Lately I’ve been a little
paranoid that I’m taking Dash for granted, letting him do his thing (throw his
toy cars off the porch) while I do mine (pick up his toy cars). I have to
remind myself that he is not dessert, to be enjoyed only when the broccoli that
is laundry is done. He is the meal.

To parent a toddler is to surrender to chaos over and over.
To clean the house is to swim against that current. I don’t think I’ve
neglected Dash (so far) in any way that he’ll bring up to his therapist later
in life, but I’d fare better if I could tell myself, Cool, we’re just gonna be covered in yogurt for a while.